The Jeffes Double Land Rover Journey to the UK

Martin and Shirley, along with Matt and Shaun, drive their two Land Rovers from Bulgaria to the UK in the Autumn if 2018

Introduction by Barry and Margaret Williamson

Martin and Shirley Jeffes are the owners, creators and managers (with their son Matt) of Camping Sakar Hills in the far south-eastern corner of Bulgaria. Very near the borders of both Greece and Turkey, their campsite has become a must-stay location for many long-distance travellers, whether by motorhome, caravan, motorbike or bicycle.

We first discovered Camping Sakar Hills as we returned from a 3-month motorhome tour of eastern Turkey in the spring of 2008. Pausing for a day or two, we stayed for ninety-two (3 months!) through the splendid heat of the summer. We have returned several times, each visit both a pleasure and a learning experience. The brightest of the highlights were the many Land Rover expeditions we made with Martin, searching for signs of previous occupation of the area by Thracians and Romans.

Martin's skills with the keyboard can be seen here and in his previous work on this website: Muppetry on a Grand Scale, another Land Rover adventure albeit of a unique kind. Martin has also contributed to our 26 Website Guides to Campsites and Stopovers Throughout Europe, as well as the 2011 article The Transit of Serbia which was quite a challenge in those days.

Now Martin writes:
 
Well, we did it! We brought our thirty-five-year-old Land Rover 110, which we have sold to friend Sean, all the way from southern Bulgaria to Hythe in Kent. Eighteen hundred odd miles, Shirley and I following in our fourteen-year old Defender (seen on the right).

We had prepared for the journey, taking an 'A' frame towing gadget, a lighting bar, various tow ropes, high-lift jack, plus lots of warning triangles, spanners, et al. All these preparations were for nothing, as the 110 never missed a beat over the whole journey, while the Defender suffered two punctures on the same day, which required it to borrow a spare wheel from the 110 to get us to a tyre repairer near Luneville, France. We also had to replace an indicator bulb.

We left Kolarovo at about eight-thirty on a Thursday morning with the Defender load-space crammed full of suitcases, boxes and more than a few bottles of wine. The old 110, although not so fully loaded, carried more of the heavy stuff, such as the towing 'A' frame and the hi-lift jack. Both vehicles carried as extra burden a pumpkin, donated by my neighbour, Stefka (what good expedition was ever undertaken without a pumpkin), who at the moment of our departure also gave us a large bag of apples and pears for the journey, which we managed to find a space for among all the other clutter on the back seat of the Defender.

I have owned the old 110 once before, having bought it from an employee of British Aerospace at Hitchin, who in turn had bought it from BAe. He had told me some of its history, being that it had, originally, been built as one of a batch of early 110's that were destined to be sent to the British Army, for them to try out to see if they liked this new Land Rover product. This vehicle returned to the Land Rover factory at Solihull and, unlike the rest of the batch, which seems to have been sent to Bruneii, this one remained in Land Rover ownership. When Land Rover was taken into BAe ownership it was sent to their factory at Filton, near Bristol, where it worked, I was told, in their munitions storage area, before being transferred to their plant at Hitchin, where it was used as a test-bed for various electronic gadgets to do with the Rapier missile system. That would account for the large number of holes in the floor of the load-bed! When I parted with it before, it was to Sean, who later sold it back to me. So, it is only appropriate that I now sell it back to him, knowing that it will be in good hands.

You have to have driven something like a thirty-five year old Land Rover to realise not only what great strides have been made in the design of cars and their engines, but also how much the volume of traffic and the speed it moves at have increased over the years. The 110 will potter along all day at between fifty and fifty-five miles per hour but struggles to keep up with anything faster than that.

With this in mind, when planning our route, I wanted to keep to a minimum the amount of time we would have to spend on the motorway network of Germany, as well as finding a route with few steep hills. So, in Bulgaria, we avoided the Shipka Pass and went by an easier route over the mountains on the pleasant road from Nova Zagora to Veliko Turnovo. Similarly, we didn't use the motorway that starts just east of Timisoara, in Romania, to take us up towards Arad and across the border at Nadlac. Instead we took the shorter route through Timisoara, following signs to Jimbolia and Sannicolau Mare, and over the border into Hungary at the small, car-only, border crossing at Cenad, at which there wasn't even anyone to check our paperwork on the Romanian side, and only a short wait on the Hungarian side.

The plan was to cut across the bottom of Germany on a Sunday, when there aren't many lorries about, notionally going from Salzburg to Strasbourg. Whilst we didn't actually achieve this, due mainly to the heavy traffic we encountered, plus a bit of a sightseeing detour, it could be done. The only really steep hills we had to contend with were the Vosges mountains, just after we had crossed from Germany into France, and they were well worth the trouble for the beautiful scenery we were able to enjoy, peering, as we were, through a haze of diesel fumes as the old 110 charged up the slopes in third gear.

I had planned our route to take us to a ferry crossing over the Danube at a town called Svishtov, to get us from Bulgaria to Romania. This looked like a great idea, potentially saving four hours by not having to go over the bridge at Ruse, but in reality it wasn't such a good idea. The River Danube was extremely short of water, it being early autumn, and the ferry couldn't reach the loading ramp. The customs officer we talked to thought they might be running a ferry in about four hours but, as we didn't feel inclined to wait, he suggested we go about thirty miles west along the river to a place called Nikopol where the ferry was still running. We had arrived at Svishtov in time to catch the one o'clock ferry, had it been running and, having driven on to Nikopol, we were just in time to see the two o'clock ferry making its way across the river. Next one was four o'clock, so we sat and waited and realised we had lost three hours of journey time.

Both Svishtov and Nikopol look, like most eastern European towns, as though they have experienced better times long ago and the world has moved on, leaving them behind. They were probably quite busy as places to cross the Danube until Stalin had the good idea of building the Freedom Bridge at Ruse. Now they reflect quietly on their past glory, and watch the river flow by, albeit, at the moment, at very low ebb.

The ferry at Nikopol runs every two hours and can accommodate eight articulated lorries and about half a dozen cars. The crossing takes only about fifteen minutes and loading and unloading the vehicles on the Romanian side doesn't seem to take too long. Most of the time is spent on the Bulgarian side, where the same border control people first deal with all the vehicles coming off the ferry, before dealing with those of us who are waiting to embark. Lorries probably have to wait for several hours to cross, but it doesn't look as though many cars use this route, so the longest one would have to wait would be a couple of hours. They load the eight artics in first and then fill in the space behind them with cars.

Once across, and the crossing only takes about fifteen minutes, it was off through Romania to the industrial town of Craiova, where we stopped at the Relax Hotel, which was spotlessly clean, welcoming and inexpensive. Collecting our overnight bags from the Defender, the blasted bag of apples fell out and rolled around the car park. Next morning on through Romania to Timisoara, where we experienced our second delay, this time on the inner ring road, on which there is a level crossing over which a goods train was being shunted back and forth, bringing road traffic quickly to a standstill for about twenty minutes.

Once we got away from that we scooted on to a small border crossing at a place called Cenad, where we passed quickly into Hungary and realised that we had now gained an hour, having passed from one time zone to another. This allowed us to press on for an extra hour to the small town of Tatabanya, about twenty miles west of Budapest. This had been my target for the second day in the planning stage of the trip; a bad bit of planning, as we couldn't find anywhere to stay in the town.

The first place we tried we had entered through a car park built into the ground floor of the hotel. To get to Reception one had to walk through a series of concrete passages with steel security doors, which had the feel of a nuclear bunker. When we arrived at the reception desk in a very smart foyer, there was a young man who told us he was a student who was just looking after things for a few minutes for the receptionist, and he didn't know anything about the hotel. We went up in the lift to see if the restaurant was open, which it wasn't. As it seemed as though there was no-one but us and the student receptionist in the place, we left. Tried a couple of smaller bed and breakfast type places, called 'panzios', to no avail but eventually found rooms in a 'panzio' on the Budapest side of the motorway, looking down on the town, called 'Panzio Panorama'. Good food but rooms a bit scruffy.

Sadly, Tatabanya is very similar to Svishtov and Nikopol, but without even the Danube as a focal point. Admittedly it was dark when we arrived there but it looked like a small, industrial town, which is a shame, as it has an interesting sounding name.

Next morning off about nine o'clock and virtually all day on the motorway towards Salzburg, only leaving it in the late afternoon to seek out the Attersee, a large and stunningly beautiful lake in Austria, where we spent the night at the Hotel Alpenblick in the village of Abtsdorf, which is where we realised that we were no longer in Eastern Europe when we were told that a double room would cost over a hundred euros. But the rooms were good and the owner's wife, who was the chef, produced a good dinner for us.

Everywhere around the Attersee is almost as though it is made of Lego. The houses are brightly painted, conform to regular shapes and are very well maintained. There is nothing old and tatty, no mess, no rubbish or litter, not even, it would seem, any mud, which is all a bit unsettling. The views of the lake and the mountains around it are quite breathtaking, and the air is very clean, as you would expect. Unfortunately, we didn't hear any yodelling.

Next day, Sunday, although we set off at a reasonable hour, sometime around nine am, we soon got caught up in heavy traffic on the A1 motorway heading towards the German border. We got stuck in a long jam approaching the border, probably three miles long, caused by the German border police forcing all traffic into one lane and making us all drive very slowly past, while they closely scrutinised us. This delay cost us more time and, even when we had got into Germany, we still had problems with the heavy volume of traffic, which seemed to slow to a crawl every few miles, sometimes when going past a broken-down car, sometimes for no apparent reason. My target place to stay in the planning stage had been the small town of Neuf-Briesach, just inside France, but we didn't get anywhere near that. Admittedly, we did do a quick flypast of the Promenade in Friedrichshaven, which wasn't on the original plan, but it was mainly just the slow traffic that forced us to seek out the Landhaus Walkenmuehle, an old watermill, in the middle of a forest at a place called Bonndorf.

It was as we stopped for fuel late in the afternoon north of Friedrichshaven that we noticed that one of the Defender's rear tyres looked very soft so, as we hadn't got much further to go that day, we just pumped it up and pressed on, keeping an eye on it.

All our overnight stops had been found by Sean and Matt in the 110, while on the move. Using Google Maps on their phones, finding places, comparing prices and availability, they made bookings as we trundled onwards.

Landhaus Walkenmuehle was an oasis of warmth and welcome at the end of a track in a clearing in the trees, set by a stream which, presumably, powered the mill in times past. Run by a retired tyre-fitter and his wife, it had been cleverly modernised to offer good, comfortable facilities and yet look like an old building, both externally and internally. The food was excellent, topped off only by the Black Forest Devils, an extremely pleasant fiery liqueur that we may, or may not, have had too much of.

Next morning all was misty and murky, with the damp hanging in the air and a dull ache behind the eyes. This was when I observed that yesterday's soft tyre was today's flat one. So out with the hi-lift jack and in no time we'd swapped it for the spare, said our goodbyes to our host, who had offered to plug the flat tyre (an offer that I, foolishly, didn't accept), and were on the road again towards the French border just to the west of the town of Freiburg. Crossing this border caused us no delay at all, and it was quickly noticeable how the landscape changed to look 'French'; equally, how many roundabouts there were in this part of the world.

Our planned northerly route kept us off the 'péages', so it did involve quite a bit of chopping and changing from one road to another, which probably didn't help with the roundabouts, but it was pleasant countryside to be bimbling through. Somewhere near Luneville, on a very busy dual carriageway, disaster struck in the form of another flat tyre for the Defender, which was still carrying the flat tyre from earlier in the day. Equally distressing, the 110 was about three hundred yards ahead of us at the time and had to do about fifteen miles of backtracking, just to get back to us to lend us its spare wheel. All the while, lorries thundered past us at sixty miles an hour, while I used the extremely effective Land Rover-supplied jack to lift the Defender, the hi-lift jack being in the 110. Once sorted, we deemed it prudent to visit the nearby town and get the punctures mended before traveling further. All of this must have cost us at least three hours in lost time but we weren't in a race and it was a sunny afternoon, so what the heck!

As mentioned earlier, our overnight stays had been selected by Sean and Matt 'on the move' and had proved by and large to be good choices. Our final night's choice of hotel proved just as good, when we eventually found it. It was a Le Relais hotel not far from Verdun but, just to confuse our hotel selectors, there were two within about five miles of each other and Sean put the one that he hadn't booked into his satnav. This caused some considerable confusion for the receptionist when we tried to impress upon her that we had made a booking, and for us when she tried to impress upon us that we hadn't. But it all got sorted out in the end.

Tuesday morning and off to Dunkirk, to watch the two o'clock ferry leaving as we bought our tickets. But we only had to hang around for about an hour before we were loading onto another one, away at four o'clock. A meal on the ferry and, before we knew it, we were back at our house in Hythe in time to unload the 110 and wave goodbye to it and to Sean.

So, six days, some eighteen hundred miles, hotels in different countries each day. Time lost for a variety of reasons (probably around ten hours), scenery seen – wonderful, company- good. I've done the journey before several times, usually in three days, not going by this route but just blasting down the Autobahns through the frenetic, overcrowded centre of Germany. Without doubt this slower journey was a far more enjoyable way to do it. We could have driven at least two more hours each day, and so done the trip in five days, or even four without all the delays we experienced, but that really wouldn't have been in the spirit of our stately progress and, perish the thought, we might not have got to experience the Black Forest Devils.

Sean has subsequently done some research into the 110's history and established that it was one of four vehicles supplied by Land Rover to the MOD for what is listed as Stage 2 Validation, bearing the military registration number 00 NC 08.